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Brazil World Cup – the most talked about event in Facebook history

The FIFA World Cup in Brazil has become the most talked about event in the history of Facebook.

We are just out of the group stages and there are already over 1 billion likes, comments and posts.

“People are having conversations on Facebook about what they watch in a really unprecedented scale,” Nick Grudin, the company’s director of partnerships, told Reuters.

“In addition to sharing and connecting with friends, people are engaging in real time with the media and the public voices they care about most.”

“This Cup has been a catalyzing cultural moment for people around the world,” Grudin said, “and we see it reflected on Facebook.”

In the last few days Facebook has received a lot of negative feedback as it was made public that the company conducted a large psychological experiment on close to 700,000 users back in 2012. Facebook wanted to see if they could effect your emotions in a positive or negative way by serving you certain content and guess what, they could and did, here is a quote from the research:

“for people who had positive content reduced in their News Feed, a larger percentage of words in people’s status updates were negative and a smaller percentage were positive. When negativity was reduced, the opposite pattern occurred.”

The 1 billion mark for the World Cup is certainly good news for Facebook but somehow we think the experiment the company conducted will dominate the discussions in the coming weeks and raise questions and further concerns as to what the social media giant is doing with our information.